I care what the H7N9 numbers are...

Who cares what the #H7N9 numbers are? http://t.co/P1Utc4HFr4
— Crawford Kilian (@Crof) February 17, 2014

This was the Tweet from Crawford Kilian (hereafter "Crof") a couple of days ago. 

I respect Crof. He has been as much of a mentor in my year doing this as has anyone. He even sent me his book on "Writing for the Web". I immediately changed a few things that I did after reading parts of it. Unfortunately nothing can help my appalling typing skills.

So when I saw that Tweet I thought it must have been a hook to get people to come read the full story. Twitter is a great way to attract readers to my blog; its a top referring site. Among other things, it's an important tool for promoting what we write to a wider audience. Sometimes a catchy title can be as good a bait as something more straight down the line. So, hooked, I dutifully read on.

What I found has been disappointing me ever since I read it 2 days ago, because I care about these numbers, and I thought you did too, Crof.

The article is of a type that I have read several times from Crof. It reminds those of us getting carried away with small, confined disease outbreak that hey, it's a great big world of misery out there and many more people are suffering and dying of all manner of diseases, a lot of which we forget about. Sometimes we don't forget though, we just focus on other things for a time.

I think it is a very valid point to make; and to make it over and over again is also fine with me. Points made in a blog post are very quickly forgotten, if they are ever read in the first place. At least a search engine may lead some back to that post or online newspaper story, unlike a printed newspaper which if not read may never have existed.

What really disappointed me I think...and I've been trying to work out why this has stuck with me for 2-days now, even causing me to give up on writing this last night or on blogging about viruses at all...is that Crof's post never did back away from the message of that original Tweet. Who cares about those numbers? It continued to hammer home that to follow such small numbers of deaths needed a special kind of justification, even for Crof. He said....

When I see WHO's H7N9 updates extending to 10 or 15 cases, it looks a bit alarming, I grant you. But let's put it in proportion.

and

Yes, I pay more attention to avian flu than to lung cancer and malaria. So, unfortunately, does everyone else...if you define "everyone else" as affluent, educated, vaccinated individuals living in countries with excellent public health systems and drinkable tap water.

and 

For us, it's the implicit threat of some clever virus that holds our attention: we don't have a vaccine for this one, so we ourselves are as vulnerable as some kid in Cité Soleil or Asunción or Gorakhpur.

and

I suppose we can justify our interest by arguing that by studying these new diseases, we learn more about other diseases, and ourselves, as well. And that's a plausible argument.

Finishing with

Meanwhile, since I posted a few minutes ago that 768 mothers died in childbirth today, the number has risen to 775.

So Crof, are there so few people on the planet that some cannot keep an eye on one disease, some on another? I get that we do have to prioritise certain diseases over others. We have limited resources and human nature seems such that we never get everyone to pull in the same direction for long enough to truly solve our problems. But there is no definition of a suitably attention-worthy number of lives lost to infection. Every infection that takes a life, or even those that make life miserable, are worthy of our attention, our study, our understanding and eventually, our efforts in defeating it. I care about those numbers.

You cited a number of examples of other causes of far greater human death and disease. I remember a post or comment of yours with similar information that has always sat in the back of my mind as a check and balance of over-reacting.  Yet I have also read many other posts from you that champion the need for better information about MERS and MERS-CoV cases, for example. You often provide "granular" (my word of the month) detail on individuals with infections. You followed the story of a single French MERS patient for many weeks. And so did we because of you. So I simply don't "get" how this post fits, if not to remind us that ALL the numbers are always worthy of our care. 

Yes. There are very few cases of H7N9 compared to the world’s population. But there could be many more, as I know you are more aware than many, with only a few bits of bad luck and circumstance lying between "sporadic" and "sustained". Why not have more eyes rather than fewer on such risks?

There were very few cases of SARS, H5N1 or even now, few new cases of polio or measles compared to such a huge denominator. But each and every one of those diseases has been and should be watched, followed, tracked and its every aspect quantified. 

Every death that could be prevented now with vaccination or in the future by better education, better research, better understanding of the patterns and changes to those patterns, and better awareness by the public themselves, is one more person who remains a living family member. I don't dwell on every death I've reported but I know what it would be like if it happened to someone close to me.  

So I leave you with these 2 thoughts...

And if a little pandemic porn helps all of us protect our health, and outgrow the need for such porn, then maybe it's worthwhile.

..the attention we pay to these fringe viruses is certainly worth the effort..

...and I hope to read many more like them in the future Crof. 

Just like you care about the words that you masterfully write, I think you like me, also really do care about what the H7N9 number are.